"At the height of his career, Richard Williams was hailed as the next Walt Disney. He wanted to prove that animation was high art, not just something to sell toys and cereal. So he spent three decades working on a single film called The Thief and The Cobbler, which was going to be extraordinary. But he made a deal with a movie studio that he couldn't keep. Garrett Gilchrist, Kevin Schreck, Neil Boyle and Greg Duffell discuss whether Hollywood or Williams's perfectionism did him in."

Here is a large collection of photographs shot in 2007 (and a few in 2008) during the production of Shamelessly She-Hulk - most previously unseen. The first few days of shooting were heavily documented by photographer Alecia Ashby. She-Hulk actress Kierstyn Elrod posed for several photo shoots. This was before Lesley Youngblood had been cast as Jennifer Walters. That happened later, and unfortunately at that point no photographs were being shot. There was at least one more shoot with Kierstyn (in the red and grey outfit from the Weathermaster scene, and a couple other outfits), but I don't have most of those photos at hand. You'll see a few of them here anyway.

Erik Adams of The Onion AV Club reviews our Henson Rarities channel:Thank heavens for the VHS junkie, the VCR jockey, and the other nonprofessional, copyright-flouting cultural archivists preserving the not-so-recent, videotaped past on the internet. In the highly specialized field of Muppet preservation, there’s no more valuable public resource than Henson Rarities, a YouTube channel overseen by artist, writer, and filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist. Gilchrist has pulled hours and hours of Jim Henson- and Muppet-related footage from video-cassette sources, keeping commercially unavailable odds and ends like The Muppets Go To The Movies, The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show, and The Jim Henson Hour (the last of which proved handy for me on a recent assignment) in circulation. In addition to pulling Sam And Friends and Muppet Inc.’s anarchic advertising work back from broadcast oblivion, the channel also collects material that didn’t make it to air, like the pilot presentation for Handmade Video (a proto-reality show starring, among others, Dana Gould) or video footage from Henson’s 1991 memorial service in New York. Putting aside the ghoulish and voyeuristic subtext of the latter, the memorial service does serve as a testament to the amount of joy, kindness, and humor that Henson put out into the world—then again, that’s the takeaway from nearly every video on Henson Rarities. [Erik Adams]